VengefulChip

Not much has happened over here in the past two months, and I would like to apologise for that. Life unfortunately takes over at times, and as much as I’d love to work more on this project, sometimes I end up not have nearly any time at all. No this doesn’t mean that I’m resigning from posting new soundtracks, just that it’ll probably take a while between releases at times, depending on how crowded my schedule is.

So anyway, this time I decided to work on A-Train’s (A列車で行こう3) sequel. Even though the music of this game is not that impressive in the japanese versions, it’s still quite nice to listen to. Although I have to add that the MT-32 version of it sounds fabulous, even on a mediocre composition effort. Then again, when was it even a MT-32 game soundtrack I didn’t like? Haha. Doubt it many would know these games, or their western counterparts, which did not sell that well when they were released, I still hope you’ll give them a try. Speaking of the western releases, the AdLib set might have one track missing  (“Economic Upturn”), as I could not have triggered it to play in-game in the limited time I had to play the game. And since I could not record it from other sources, such as with HooT, I had to leave it out for now, but I’ll update the set once I have the time to play the game for a bit longer, and trigger the sound piece). Please also note that I haven’t played the japanese versions of the game that much (or I haven’t been very good at them), so I wasn’t sure how to name some of the tracks. If you know how to name them or at which events they play, please do let me know! :)

I don’t think this game needs any introduction, we’ve all played it and enjoyed it thoroughly (at least I know I did!). This game appears to have set the standard by which LucasArts’ sound team composed music, since all subsequent titles (Sam and Max: Hit the Road, MM: Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis…). They all seem to have this jazz-infused funk sound to them, which I must add that it’s not at all in bad taste, just becomes a bit dull after a while.

This game is quite notorious for introducing iMuse, an interactive music system that generates music on the fly, changing instruments, or adding composite parts of a song depending on what actions you take in-game. While this might seem a nice idea, I kind of hate Michael Land for his initiative to make this system, since it made my job a lot harder :)

Eventually they discontinued iMuse allegedly because the creators saw that people typically do not really notice much and that it was too much of a hassle (something I agree with them).

So as I mentioned, it was quite difficult to work on this game, and I had to resort to various trickery to get the tracks to sound proper and clean (without SFX, no interferences, etc.). But that was no problem, since I can always take a challenge :D

Unfortunately that also means that it would be quite impossible to record an “accurate” soundtrack of one port of this game that stays consistent with how the other ports sound. Like for example, the song that plays when inside LeChuck’s fortress has quite a lot of little bits of music that are added randomly to the main song/theme. So no matter what I do, I will not be able to make that song on the CM-32L port to sound the same as the Macintosh version (music arrangement-wise).

Posting this later than intended, I meant to post this two to three weeks ago as I wanted to post another game by the end of the year, but alas I got caught up in a lot of stuff that I had to do, my schedule became quite crammed. Unfortunately I won’t be able to finish the other game in time, so I’ll have to leave it for January. At least you’ll have another reason to look forward to the new year as the other game is a major title, and (as with most of the titles posted here) doesn’t have the full soundtrack available anywhere But enough spoilers for now, let’s talk about this release!

The game is quite fun as with the previous games in the Lemmings series, and the music is quite good, except it has repetitive themes and the rhythm gets a bit stale upon multiple listens. It’s still quite the contender, but could be a lot better. If you’ve never played the game and you were to try it out, you’d surely be creeped out by the wonky CGI, annoyed at the clumsy controls and confused by the layout of the levels. The LAPC-1 (MT-32) set sounds a bit odd on some tracks, which is understandable considering that the game music was composed and intended for Roland SCC-55, but still sounds better than many conversions of other games. I’ll also have to apologise for the improper instrument volumes in the GeneralMIDI set. I did not have any way of extracting the midi data out of the game, so I could only record the midi commands out of DOSBox, and that isn’t always very accurate, and that makes it harder to tamper with the instruments and their volumes. So it ended up not sounding that great with the soundfont used. If I’ll ever be able to extract the midi data out of the game, I promise to update the GM set :) One last thin I need to specify: the CDDA set is exactly the same as on Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn, so I omitted adding the latter two as they’re redundant.

Here we go again with another game. As I mentioned previously (or rather a few weeks ago) here, this is going to be a request I’m going to do for Daniel T. who is the first person to donate anything to this project :D

This is one of those games that go by multiple names, scattered across all regions, so to avoid any confusion I’m going to refer to this game by it’s most often used name (also it’s the original japanese name of the arcade game, after which all the other ports were made).

It’s quite a fun and cute (not to mention nonsensical!) puzzle/platformer game that I vaguely remember playing as a little kid on the SNES (though it was the sequel of this one, although I find the prequel much better). The musical score is overall excellent (as you’d come to expect from japanese composers) and I have enjoyed every second of listening to it while recording. What I really enjoy about these sorts of the games is that it makes the player travel through quite a few landmarks around the globe, and for a geography freak like myself I really enjoy being able to see all the neat little backgrounds and as a kid I would enjoy learning about new places.

Unfortunately I could not work on two ports of the game, namely the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum ones, as they don’t have any option to disable the sound effects, and they perpetually ring throughout the game (and I can’t pause the game either, to be able to hear only the background music). Fortunately at least the CPC version sounds similar to the Atari ST one, so you won’t miss much. If in the future I find a way of properly recording from those platforms, I promise I’ll add those sets as well. Also for some reason, my recordings from the Arcade version of the game seem to be at a slightly higher tempo than what I’ve heard it some longplay videos (I always watch those when I record a set to make sure I’ve properly tagged the songs in order of appearance in the game), and I’m not sure if it’s an emulation issue or that’s supposed to sound like, so please let me know which way it’s supposed to sound, and maybe even provide some recordings if you’re able. :)

A rather obscure NES platformer that I consider to have some awesome music! I remember playing this game alot as a kid, during the time I only had a NES as a console, the other being a 386DX-powered PC. I remember always losing on the 2nd stage due to my clumsiness, but after getting to record this game, I think I’ll try to finally beat the game itself this time sometime soon. Today while working on this I also learnt that the original japanese version was made after an tokusatsu show.

I’ll have to be honest with you guys, playing this game after so long it feels like the game itself is half-baked, made in a rush to gear in for the profits. Perhaps it’s just because the game is aimed at kids, and is educational in purpose? I don’t know, but the game is so random… you basically have nothing predictable as in other management or sim games, your chance of making your business last depends pretty much on your luck. Even the soundtrack feels half-baked, doesn’t have any interesting melodies, nor does it use any interesting combinations of instruments, but I decided to give this game a chance anyway, as the music itself still has some use in bringing some nostalgic feelings :)

I used to play this game in the computer science class during primary school, remember it being very fun but not very challenging, the music is still nice though, has more depth than what most of the Apogee games had. Also had the cheesiest story lines ever, especially for a story about a wizard. :P

This time I bring you the soundtrack from yet another puzzle game I enjoyed a few years back (still do enjoy playing the game actually!). I didn’t use to remember this game for it’s soundtrack, mainly because it didn’t seem to me that it had an outstanding one, but upon a closer inspection now, I really got to like it even more. And of course, it sounds the best on the CM-32L, as usual from Roland’s modules :D Unfortunately that one set is lacking, as I could not record in-game (if you would play the game itself, you will know why) so I had to use Hoot to record the soundtrack, and apparently it misses one track. Oh well, I’ll try to see if I can fix it, after which I’ll update the link to the download and re-upload the fixed video :)

Ended up posting this the following week, ugh. Took quite a long time recording this, especially since I’ve tried to get it to work with Gravis UltraSound as a sound option in the IBM-PC version of the game, but for some reasons the game kept playing it out of tempo, it getting really annoying after a while. Besides the Gravis UltraSound that I could not include this time, I also had to leave out the Macintosh version since I could not get the emulator to play the midi files properly, the PC-98 version is missing because I could not get the disk(s) for the game (I wonder if anyone at all has them!) and also the MegaDrive/32X port does not have a music player and it’s impossible to record songs in-game on certain levels. Maybe if I can fix any of the above issues, I’ll be adding those ports as well. So anyway, when I was younger I used to play a lot of FPS games, but after a while I grew out of it and started focusing on other genres, as things got boring and repetitive quickly. The soundtrack in itself now mostly brings me nostalgic feelings, and probably what got me into liking metal as a teenager :D

Here’s the infamous game, by Lucas Arts (yes, I’m having an adventure game fever, more soundtracks from this company to come in the future though :D). The game itself doesn’t have many songs included (except the NES and Famicom ports), but I chose it as I wanted something quick to transition to the next game which is quite well-known, and the soundtrack is very memorable, I’m not going to give out any more hints though Hopefully it’ll be done by the end of this week, so look forward to that! Anyway, back to Maniac Mansion, it was quite fun to play the game again, and as with most of the games I post here, it brought me a lot of memories of how this game used to creep the hell out of me when I was little, haha. And as with Loom, I skipped the Atari ST port since it sounded exactly like the enhanced Tandy one. :D

So this time it’s Loom that I chose to post, so hopefully your wait was worth it (more than one month, ugh!) I have vague memories of this game from when I played The Secret of Monkey Island, there was Cob, one of the characters in Loom advertising for the game, but I never really got interested in playing it until two years ago. The game has some arranged scores by Tchaikovski (all from Swan Lake), and while I’m not a fan of his works (I’m more of a Bach/Liszt/Debussy fan in terms of classical music), it’s still fun to listen to all the different interpretations done by each platform There were two duped plaforms that I didn’t include, namely Atari ST (sounded exactly like the Tandy version) and FM Towns (all of it’s tracks were already available in the PC-Engine version, and the latter had some extras, so I chose to post that version instead) :D

This is an odd one, and as I’ve explained in the previous Castlevania release, I kept this one separate due for the fact that it uses different music compared to the original game. That’s the reason why I’ll be calling it this way, to avoid confusion. Konami are quite well known for not “conforming” well with their ports, releasing them haphazardly. But I think this time it’s to our benefit, as this way members of the Konami Kukeiha Club got to use the full capabilities of the X68000. I really recommend you give both versions of the game’s soundtrack a listen!  :)

This is a platformer that’s considered a gem in the Amiga community, being called “Amiga’s own version Sonic the Hedgehog”, to the same fashion that Jazz Jackrabbit was dubbed with the same title in IBM-PC’s case. I remember having a great deal of frustration with the game when I was little, very hard to beat, even the first level! Strangely I remember this game having more sound options when I played it on my old (now defunct) 486DX machine, but it seems not to be the case. The game had the same sample-based music as on the Amiga (booooring!), but still the game’s soundtrack was worth doing it so here you go:

Not a very well-known game, perhaps it’s better known among the german audience, but it’s a gem nonetheless and I’m glad I had the opportunity to play it. Packs in quite a lot of humour, but don’t let that fool you, as it’s quite a fierce simulation game. The soundtrack for it is very creative and interesting, and fits in quite nicely the humorous atmosphere of the game :D I’d really recommend it to anyone who likes strategy/simulation games. Just make sure to avoid the IBM-PC MS-DOS version as it crashes at random times and has a few bugs. Too bad as it’s the version that has the best music, at least in my opinion!

A fun little game, and is worthy of it’s franchise, all too bad that it was discontinued by Konami!

The soundtrack in it has a really light and nostalgic feel to it (I guess you’re starting to see a pattern here :P), but it’s noticeable that the Konami sound crew (or Konami Kukeiha Club) did take some inspiration from the earlier work they’ve done on the Gradius series.